Four-way Ogre game

On Tuesday night I ran a game of Ogre Designer's Edition for the Lone Star Historical Miniatures group at Dragon's Lair.  The playing area consisted of two full maps and two half-maps.  (I see now I had enough room on the tables to use all four maps in their entirety.  Maybe next time.)

Each player had an Ogre Mark III, four GEVs, two heavy tanks, one superheavy--and three cruise missile crawlers (a.k.a. nukes).  The nukes got used early and often, and made the game more interesting from the outset with their unlimited range and wide destructive radius.

The players quickly relearned the old NATO doctrine that it's a good idea NOT to concentrate your forces when your enemy has strategic nuclear weapons.  They also learned that GEVs are vulnerable to the blast shockwave from outside the range of their own weapons.

The overlays that came with Ogre DE provided some nice special effects to depict the aftermath of the nuclear blasts.  Craters soon dotted the map, and many a town and forest hex were reduced to rubble, slowing down the smaller units.  And one player detonated a nuke at the end of a bridge he would need to cross.  Since craters are impossible to everything, even Ogres, his units were trapped on the other side of the river.

This game wasn't just a four-way slugfest, however--the idea was to reach the destroyed Ogre (from the Nightfall counter set) in the middle of the map and park an armor unit for two turns or an Ogre for one turn in an adjacent hex to download the dead cybertank's computer core.  So in addition to lobbing nukes at each other, the four players were racing to complete the mission.

In the end, all sides were able to reach the destroyed Ogre and download the information.  So the game became a race to see who would make it off the board first.  This had everybody shooting at the other Ogres to try and slow them down.

By this point, I had taken over for a player who had to leave.  His red Ogre had reach the objective first, so its treads became a favorite target for the other three gamers.

The Ogre was soon worn down to a move of 2, and then 1, meaning the other Ogres would all beat me off the board.  I did get a small measure of revenge by destroying a bridge while a superheavy and a heavy were on it.

An enjoyable evening of gaming, especially for the two gamers who had never played Ogre before.  I hope to run a game again next month.  I even have an idea for a scenario using all four of the big maps.  It involves a Mark VI ...